emission

Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain Putting a price on CO₂ emissions and thus making emissions more expensive can make a significant contribution to reducing them. In a study published in The Economic Journal, Prof. Dr. Fabian Herweg, University of Bayreuth, and Prof. Dr. Klaus M. Schmidt, LMU Munich, compare two governmental instruments of carbon pricing with regard to their effectiveness: A carbon tax strengthens the…

Contrails from a Emirates Airbus A380.Photo: Martin Macak Gregor (AP)When Google launched a carbon emissions tool for its flight tracker last fall, allowing consumers to see the individual emissions created by each flight they were browsing, it received widespread attention and praise from industry leaders and climate scientists alike. But last month the tech giant quietly shiftedthe algorithm to exclude a crucial component of the overall greenhouse gas impact of air travel—meaning that emissions data on the flights it…

Conducting quantum chemical calculations, researchers from the University of Hong Kong (HKU), have been able to discover the origin of some mysterious Unidentified Infrared Emission (UIE) bands that have intrigued astronomers for decades. The research links the source of some of these bands to highly ionised football-shaped Buckminsterfullerene C60 or buckyballs. Such bands were first discovered and studied for 30 years and have since kept scientists puzzled over their source. Earlier, researchers had shown that C60…

Scientists may have just tracked down the source of some mysterious infrared glows detected emanating from stars and clouds of interstellar dust and gas.These Unidentified Infrared Emission (UIE) bands have baffled scientists for decades; according to a theoretical new work, at least some of these bands can be produced by highly ionized buckminsterfullerene, more commonly known as buckyballs.  "I am extremely honored to have played a part in the astonishingly complex quantum chemistry investigations undertaken by Dr…

Not all stars are happy to just hang around, orbiting the galactic center with all the other stars. Some stars go rogue, punted out across the Milky Way with significant force. These are the runaway stars, and we can trace their trajectories to understand violent events that can take place in the Universe.  One such star, and one of the more famous, is Zeta Ophiuchi. Located around 440 light-years from Earth in the equatorial constellation of Ophiuchus, it's also one of the oddest stars in the sky.Not only is it…

Friday Effiong wipes his face with the back of his palms to clean a simmering sweat as he struggles to separate the fleshy part of a cow leg from its bones with a machete. A customer awaits the product of this labour. The impact of the heavy rain that fell that Tuesday morning was already telling on his face due to poor sales, but that did not discourage him from expressing his displeasure about the unhygienic condition of the Abak Central Abattoir in Akwa Ibom. Cow bones were poorly disposed of at the Abak…

After spending nearly half a year, every year, gathering and calculating carbon emissions data on spread sheets, Salesforce.com's climate team was fed up. So in 2017 they built an app to crunch the numbers - and now they sell it for $4,000 (roughly Rs. 3 lakh) a month.As global companies prepare pledges to help stop climate change, one of the first problems they face is quantifying their emissions. The second is understanding if their solutions work.That need is fuelling a boom in carbon accounting software by big…

The European Space Agency (ESA) has announced a new mission where human-made emissions of greenhouse gases will be tracked from space. ESA, in collaboration with the European Union's (EU) Earth-monitoring programme Copernicus, announced this mission during the UN Climate Change Conference COP26 in Glasgow on November 2. It will incorporate a constellation of satellites called European CO2 Monitoring and Verification Support Capacity (CO2MVS). This will help countries to stay on track and meet climate change mitigation…

Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain Nitric oxide (NO) is a major contributor to atmospheric pollution, and forest soil is an important source of NO emission. However, there are great uncertainties in global forest soil NO emission due to lack of high-frequency NO emission measurements. …

Korean automobile manufacturers have been raided by German authorities because their vehicles are suspected of using emission defeating devices. The authorities believe that 2,10,000 diesel cars sold by Kia and Hyundai are using illegal defeat devices. Eight business offices of the automakers were raided in Luxembourg and Germany. The operation was coordinated by European Union Agency Eurojust. The raids were confirmed by a spokesperson from Hyundai Motor Group, representing both Hyundai & Kia. It is being said…